Russian spy ring: a guide to spying

A guide to the methods and terminology used by the Russian spying network.

1:13PM BST 29 Jun 2010

Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has suffered the humiliating blow of having its techniques – known in the espionage community as tradecraft – exposed.

The ten people arrested in America were 'illegals' a subset of the spying community tasked with gathering material on a foreign country that may not be highly classified or particularly unusual. Illegals assume the identities of residents of a foreign country by building a 'legend,' a personal history that may rely on assuming the identity of a dead citizen or creating a false identity from scratch.

The techniques ranged from classic ruses that have been in use for hundreds of years to the use of modern technology:

BRUSH PASS: Agents exchanged parcels of money or instructions while walking past each other. According to the court documents one such encounter involved Christopher Metsos and a Russian diplomat carrying identical orange bags which they swapped as they passed on the stairs of a subway station in New York. The bags contained money was buried in a field at a spot marked by a partially buried brown bottle. It was dug up two years later.

PARK MEETING: Spies favour wide-open spaces filled with random numbers of people because the chances of an exchange being accidentally exposed is low. Vicky Pelaez, one of the arrested suspects, was filmed by the FBI receiving a package, thought to have contained $80,000, during a meeting in a park in a South American country.

CODE WORDS: Contacts forged with US officials, congressional aides and think tank employees are referred to in code. Sources are called 'Cat,' 'Farmer' and 'Parrot.'

FALSE IDENTITIES: Richard Murphy, also charged, was despatched to meet an SVR agent in Rome, from whom he was to receive a false Irish passport. His purported wife, Tracey receives laboured instructions on the use of a fake British passport including: "sign your passport on page 32." She is instructed to destroy the memo after reading.

INVISIBLE INK: Two of the defendants are said to have delivered messages written in invisible ink to Russian handlers on a trip to South America.

SECRET PASSWORDS: The introductory greetings used by those under surveillance leapt straight from the pages of an ancient spy novel. An undercover agent phoned Mikhail Semenko, another of the arrested suspects, to initiate a rendezvous. "Could we have met in Beijing in 2004?" he said. "Yes we might have but I believe it was in Harbin," came the reply.

WIFI EXCHANGES: Electronic exchanges demonstrated that the Russians are not stuck in the Cold War. Several of the suspects sat in bookshops or cafés and broadcast messages to Russian officials driving past in cars. A commercially available device was used to link the accounts of those involved in the exchange.

STEGANOGRAPHY: Information was encrypted and published within an innocuous looking photograph published on the internet. The FBI said one image was protected by a 27-character password, which once broken into contained readable text.

RADIOGRAMS: Short-wave radio transmissions of coded data – always referred to as RGs. One FBI raid uncovered a spiral notebook filled with random columns of numbers that was used to decipher incoming messages.

FLASH MEMORY: Sticks were swapped in brush past meetings.

FOLDED NEWSPAPERS: One exchange of cash took place in the folded pages of a newspaper.

DISINFORMATION: Miss Pelaez wrote a newspaper column in a newspaper for Hispanics in the US that was highly critical of American foreign policy.

CONTACT CULTIVATION: One of the women defendants cultivated the friendship of a prominent US financier who was active in politics and could invite her to party headquarters.

FBI COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE: The American law enforcement agency revealed that it relied on a variety of electronic and human surveillance methods to keep track of the alleged Russian spies over the course of a decade.

MICROPHONE PLANTS: Listening devices were planted in the homes of several defendants.

COMMUNICATIONS MONITORED: Taps allowed the FBI to record and copy telephone and email conversations by those suspected of acting as agents.